See if you can guess the source of this quote.
“It is better for all the world … [if] society can prevent those who
are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind … Three generations of
imbeciles is enough.”

If you think that this quote came from a Nazi
document, you’re wrong. It’s from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 majority
opinion in Buck v. Bell that upheld aVirginia law mandating the sterilization of the “feebleminded.”

Twenty years later, Holmes’s words were thrown back in our face by Nazi defendants in theNuremberg trials. You see, while the Nazis’ worst crimes may have ended atAuschwitz, they “began onLong Island.”

That’s the conclusion of a new book, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
written by Edwin Black, who contends that American “corporate
philanthropies helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and
Mengele.”

Eugenics, which literally means “good
birth,” originally referred to the use of selective breeding to
“improve” the human race. Of course, what was meant by “improve”
reflected the racism and bigotry of the eugenicists. Blacks, Jews,
Eastern and Southern Europeans, the retarded, and even people with
brown hair were the targets of the “improvers.”

Thus, between 1900 and the mid-sixties, “hundreds
of thousands of Americans … were not permitted to continue their
families by reproducing.” Black compares it to “ethnic cleansing,” and
he’s right.

The tools of American eugenics included forcible
sterilization, commitment to mental institutions, prohibitions against
marriage, and even dissolution of already existing marriages. OneMichigan legislator went so far as to introduce a bill calling for the electrocution of severely retarded infants.

Eventually, American eugenics, with help from the
Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, Margaret Sanger, and
others, found its way toGermany.
While “Nazi eugenics quickly outpaced American eugenics in both
velocity and ferocity,” Black writes, the connection between the two
was never lost. As one American eugenicist told theRichmond Times-Dispatch, “the Germans are beating us at our own game.”

The Holocaust and other crimes of the Third Reich made eugenics a bad word, and the American connection was quickly swept under the rug. But the attempt to play God “never really stopped.”

Today it takes the form of “human genomic science
and corporate globalization.” Instead of racist declarations, we have
“polished PR campaigns” that hold out the promises of biotech: miracle
cures and ever-increasing life expectancies.

While the word eugenics is never used,
that’s what it is. We are intent on eliminating “imperfection” from the
gene pool. Even today, children whose “deformities” are discovered in utero
are rarely permitted to be born. And as genetic technology improves,
the list of those whom Black calls the “never-born” will continue to
expand.

If the “abolition of man” is to be stopped, this
story must be told. Christians need to pull the truth about eugenics
out from underneath the rug and hold it up as a reminder of where
playing God leads us. Six decades of denial is enough.